What happens when the SF Gay Men's Chorus tours the Deep South

The documentary director David Charles Rodrigues wanted to trace a historic movement under the Trump administration. “I believe in what they do, which is activism through music,” said Rodrigues. “They latch onto music and message in a graceful way.”

Rodrigues followed the group on a seven-day tour in the South, where they performed 25 concerts in Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and the Carolinas as part of their Lavender Pen Tour. The point was to capture the divided country and its anti-LGBT laws.

The chorus wanted to raise their voices and fight back. As one chorus member Jim White says: “Twenty years later, we’re still dealing with this s—t.”

The group didn’t know what to expect — especially from the Southern LGBT community. “The biggest discrimination was when we told people we were a camera crew from California, the Bay Area, their guard would immediately go up,” said Rodrigues. “It was telling of testing those waters of divisiveness.”

He wanted to show how the chorus survives when they’re not preaching to the choir, so to speak. “I wanted a story that showed hope, a path where we could show some dialogue, to see if this divisiveness was real or not,” said Rodrigues.

The chorus was formed after Harvey Milk, an openly gay candidate for San Francisco Supervisor, traveled around the country giving his “Hope Speech,” where he encouraged the gay community to come together.

Sims, a musician, responded to this call for urgency by forming the world’s first openly gay chorus. They had their first rehearsal in 1978 and their first national tour in 1981.

“Their first performance was on the steps of San Francisco City Hall at Harvey Milk’s vigil,” said Rodrigues. “You take that through the AIDS epidemic that devastated the gay community and became a beacon of light.”

The group kicked off the tour in Mississippi, the state that passed controversial anti-gay legislation House Bill 1523, which allows discrimination against LGBT people.

But there weren’t protesters waiting when they landed at the airport, and their experience was 90% positive and marginally riddled with conflict.

“There were moments of hope and positivity,” said Rodrigues. “When we got into the editing room, we were disappointed there weren't huge moments of protest. It's more radical and shocking to focus on the positive moments, in this day and age, so that’s what we did.”

As one chorus member muses in the film: “We see the South is more progressive than we realize.”

It was hopeful. “The reality is the extreme right or extreme left won’t ever be able to get their sides together, but there’s a lot of people in the middle who can create a path of hope and beauty for this country,” he said.

The film was shot in 2017, a far cry from 2020. While it isn’t the same as today, “it’s important to show the world there are spaces of acceptance,” said Rodrigues.

For the record: there is just one protest in the film with a handful of people in Selma holding a sign that reads: “The church should not support sin.”

“If the tour was now, considering the discriminatory side has been emboldened by the current government, the protests would be worse,” said Rodrigues.

We get to meet the LGBT community in the South, who didn’t move to Los Angeles and New York. “The instinct is to go to coastal cities, but I wanted to show there are trans, queer, gay and lesbian people fighting the good fight and living full beautiful lives in the South,” said Rodrigues. “That’s a myth I want to dispel with this film.”

We also see a rotating cast of teenagers in the film who haven’t come out of the closet, and interviews with lesbian Alabama Rep. Patricia Todd and gay pastor the Rev. Robert Lowry, who says: “I think people conflate religious freedom with the freedom to discriminate.”

There’s a segment where the chorus’s lead conductor Tim Seelig talks about his own experience growing up in the South, marrying a woman, having two kids, being part of the church — then coming out as gay. “That Southern veneer that ‘we’re hospital to all’ is basically bulls—t,” Seelig says. “Nobody in a church of 20,000 people reached out to me with compassion.”

But despite the different views in the film, Rodrigues says, “The goal was to search for peace and unity.”

Easier said than done. “The South is a distancing technique,” says Josh Burford, a queer South historian. “The idea of a prominent organization doing a goodwill tour feels condescending to Southern gays, as urban gays think we are ‘dirt-eating cousin f—kers.’”

Seelig seems taken back by the comment in the film, but says he can’t do anything about Burford’s resentment. “Everyone we meet has an interaction that changes them,” said Seelig.

The film features segments from their concerts, including one heartwarming song called “I Ain’t Afraid.” But the real action happens between concerts. In Alabama, Frank, a gay chorus member, and Ashley Blow, a trans woman singer, eat dinner at a conservative family’s house in Birmingham.

“That religious, conservative family had an open heart,” recalls Rodrigues. “We gained their trust. They made dinner for us and had them sleep in their home. It proves you can get together with people who have complete opposite views and still have a conversation.”

That dinner lasted five hours. “The whole point is not coming to an agreement, it’s just having a conversation,” he says. “The chorus went there wanting to be heard. We made this film wanting the message to be heard, but we learned going to the South and listening to these people was so much more profound than being heard.”

“If you want to be heard — you have to listen. That is a huge learning curve we had.”

Nadja Sayej is a freelance writer who covers arts and culture, has interviewed over 200 celebrities and has written 5 books. Twitter: @nadjasayej Website: nadjasayej.com.